This is a post by Novel Publicity President, Emlyn Chand/ I’ve been writing some very lengthy posts about social media lately. Posts that I hope you’ve been finding useful. At this point, I have so many ideas to share, so many ideas stacked-up in my cluttered brain—ideas that just aren’t big enough for one of my epic social media how-to posts. To get these demanding microbits of information to you, I’d like to supplement my ongoing Wednesday series with a new Friday series: Quick Tip Fridays.

On Quick Tips Fridays, you’ll find short and sweet articles with advice about social media, blogging, and sometimes even writing. My intent is to draw focus to special tricks of which you may not have been previously aware. Every Friday, I’ll give you something new to think about, something quick and easy. I’ll tell you why you should consider doing it and how. That’s it. Quick tips on Friday: Quick Tip Fridays.

This week’s tip is…

post previews rather than full-text articles on your blog

Why you want to do this…

You have tons of great content on your blog, and you want people to see it, right? Well, let’s say someone new has just discovered your fabulous blog or perhaps someone is returning to it after several days. What if your most recent post has absolutely no appeal to your reader? Do you expect him to scroll all the way down through your lengthy and uninteresting (at least to this reader) post?

Some might. Others aren’t so patient. Maybe this reader would have loved the post you did a few days ago or the one you got great feedback on last week, but he never saw it because it was so far down your stream. Wouldn’t it be great if the reader could just stop on by and quickly see several of your latest posts all at once? A post preview does this!

Rather than displaying the full-text, you can add in a jump-break, so that the reader is required to click to continue reading the full article. That way, if your most recent musing just isn’t for him, he can pass it by easily to see what else you have to offer. Post previews naturally pull the reader’s eye downward. A post preview is also more visually appealing since it shows multiple headlines and photos rather than a continuous wall of text.

How you can do it in WordPress…

Some WordPress themes can automatically create post previews, so that you don’t have to do it manually. To do this, go to your page’s dashboard, then visit the settings menu in the bottom left corner, click on “reading” settings. Where it says “For each article in a feed, show…” choose the radio-button for “Summary” rather than “Full Text.” Save, and you’re done.

If your WordPress theme doesn’t have this option, you’ll have to manually include a more tag, this is easy. Just look at the screenshot below:

How you can do it in BlogSpot…

For BlogSpot, you’ll have to do it manually. BlogSpot calls this a “jump break.” The screenshot below shows how you insert one:

Hope this helped! Let me know if you have follow-up questions 🙂

Emlyn Chand was born with a fountain pen grasped firmly in her left hand (true story). Novel Publicity's mascot is a Sun Conure, thanks to her obsession with birds–and she gets to decide anyway since she is the company's founder and president. Although her first novel Farsighted won the prestigious Writer's Digest Self-Published Novel of the Year award in 2012 for the YA category, she now writes most of her fiction under her “real” name, Melissa Storm. Learn more or connect with her (or her Sun Conure, Ducky!) on either of her author websites: www.emlynchand.com or www.melstorm.com. You can also friend her on Facebook, tweet with her @novelpublicity, or send her an email via [email protected].

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Emlyn

Good advice, Stupid Girl. Glad you and BC both found this post helpful. If either of you ever decide to upgrade to a hosted domain, let me know. I’ll teach you a really cool trick to help keep your posts circulating 😉

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Pamela Mason

Thanks! I tend to get overwhelmed with learning Blogger. I just started blogging one week ago, and there’s so much out there that clutters up the blog. Would you consider a list of desirable apps (gadgets, widgets, etc) for a writer’s blog for a future post? Or even some type of design critique, on how to keep it clean and readable. Thank you!

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Emlyn

I’m definitely going to do some posts about my favorite widgets sometime in the future. I’ll have to do at least three posts to cover WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and Blogspot.

If you sign up to be a host for our blog tour, I’ll personally perform a custom evaluation aimed at helping you reach 100 hits per day (and answer any follow-up questions you might have). You can read about how the blog tour works and some of the incentives we offer here: https://www.novelpublicity.com/tour/

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Emlyn

Inserting the jump break as pictured should work. I’m not as intimately familiar with BlogSpot, since I only have the account for writing articles like this. Try playing around with your option set. Maybe something about your design scheme requires you to manually activate the post preview option. Good luck!